CBS should have tried to settle whether there’s any actual evidence that widespread cheating of the disability program is going on. CBS was either uninterested in that, or decided that its stacked panel of talking heads provided the answer they wanted to hear.

If you listen to CounterSpin this week (and you should be downloading the podcast EVERY WEEK), you’ll hear this item: USA Today ran a version of an AP story September 29 about the outrageous and depressing fact that not a penny of the $1.5 billion the U.S. pledged to Haiti for rebuilding after the devastating earthquake nearly nine months ago has actually been delivered. It’s the sort of news that might make readers sad, but it should make them angry. Trouble is, you have to get to paragraph 10 of the 12 paragraph piece before you learn why the money […]

Matthew Yglesias (8/3/10) has a good takedown of senators John McCain (R.-Ariz.) and Tom Coburn’s (R.-Ok.) list of supposedly wasteful stimulus projects that generated an “exclusive” on ABC‘s Good Morning America (8/3/10): Jon Chait observes that McCain and Coburn also seem to have decided that anything relating to animals is necessarily waste. Hence a small grant to fund research on cocaine addiction and relapse is turned into “Monkeys Getting High for Science.” Hardy-har-har. There’s a case to be made that the government has no role to play in funding scientific research, but it’s a mighty bad case. If you think […]